Patagonia's recent t-shirt campaign links a young group of designers with the environmentally-conscious clothing company to produce a line of exclusive shirts. Now they're moving closer toward the gallery scene with a group exhibition set to open tomorrow, 29 March 2008, at Patagonia's Santa Monica store.

It will include the work of a couple designers previously featured on CH (Jason Munn and GeoffMcFetridge), as well as Nikki McClure (whose design is shown at right), Jason Stowell, Chris Del Moro, Jeremy Collins, Peter McBride and Kitty Botke. A few of the artists will be on hand for a meet-and-greet session and you'll be able to buy some of their work, t-shirts and otherwise. (Click image for detail.)

Also worthy of note is Patagonia's "Footprint Chronicles" project. In an unconventional move, the clothing company chose to expose the environmental and social impact from the production of their garments.

They show interviews with factory workers, farmers, owners, designers and third-party auditors and make both positive and negative revelations, many of which go against conventional wisdom. (For example, product transportation contributes a grand total of one percent of energy use.)

Fortunately, Patagonia has one of the most universally-sound manufacturing practices, but they hope the idea will spread to other companies. Us too.